Start It Yourself
I've learned an important lesson. I'm not a do-it-yourself kind of guy; I'm just the start-it-yourself kind. In fact, I've started a whole slew of projects and was going great guns on them until I got over the hump. I just don't roll downhill well, I guess. I've found my solution to this problem: pay someone else to finish what you start. So after this weekend, the entire downstairs half of my fixer-upper will be finished. The cabinet doors will finally have hardware, the outlets will be new and white, the baseboards will be replaced, the door painted, and I'm even splurging on new carpet. The old stuff was a white berber that I got free, then my tenants had their way with it, then my kids took their turn, now it's the color of [ugly]. I'm pretty excited. I'll be away for the weekend, then I'll return home, and voila it will all be done. I can't really believe it.In other news, I've just about scored a big moonlighting gig that should keep me busy around the clock for the next few months. We'll see if my blog dies again. I'm dreading it, but afterwards I'll be able to afford those two [Russian girls] I hope to adopt.
Milena and Svieta, aaaaaw.
(absolutely off topic - sorry, but I can't access Joel's blog and don't have your e-mail address)
You've read The Quark and the Jaguar! One of the best science books I've read. If you have a few minutes, check out my idea to improve democracy inspired by that book.
I'm quite fond of that idea. I'd love to see it happen all the way down to the nitty gritty day to day decisions in congress and local governments.
What you're refering to is a fundamental reinforcement learning problem of how to mix up solution-space exploration with current knowledge exploitation in order to achieve the best long term results. See Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto for a good general discussion of the topic along with lots of computational experiments for discovering a good mix. It could help you formulate the best model for use in your idea and although government would never adopt such a process, I bet you could repackage it as a small business tool for making management decisions.